Monday Morning: Markets Up, Democracy Down

I mentioned in weekend Member Chat that, on Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher had made an excellent point about how the Senate now grossly misrepresents the will of the American people as we need 60 votes to get anything done (with juvenile GOP filibustering on every bill) and that those votes come from Senators like the ones in Wyoming that represent 100,000 people who carry as much weight as the ones in California, who represent 8M people (who voted for them). 

His point was that the original 13 colonies had SLIGHT discrepancies in population and the House/Senate thing was meant to address that but surely they didn't envision one state having 100 times more people than another. Nor did the Founding Fathers intend the 3 branches of Government to be overwhelmed by the Senate – who could grind the whole process to a halt, even though both the House and the President agreed on legislation. It's a perversion of the Constitution and we do, as a nation, need to change the constitution to put an end to this abuse.

StJeanLuc pointed out this weekend that Slate had an article where they ran the numbers on the recent gun bill, which was almost a complete split between Democratic and Republican Senators and, as it turns out, the 54 Senators who backed the Manchin-Toomey bill represented 198.4 Million people while the Senators who successfully blocked the bill with 46 Senate votes represented just 114.9M people.  

Even in the House of Representatives, where the will of the people is supposed to rule, Democratic Reps got 54.3M votes while Republicans got 53.8M votes yet the GOP yet severe gerrymandering of districts gave the GOP a tremendous edge in the outcome – 234 to 201 Congressmen – more than enough to thwart the will of the President and the majority of the American people for another 2 years.  

I think, if we are going to do anything about this the Democrats have to first get angry about this and, to get angry about it they need to be aware about it so this is my first mission – to make sure people are talking about this into the next election cycle.  Even if you are a Conservative – if you truly care about the Constitution's…